Miliband pledges up to £1bn for community green energy schemes | Renewable energy
The UK government is pledging to spend up to £1bn on community-owned green energy schemes in a bid to combat growing skepticism and resistance to renewables and grid upgrade projects.
UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the new funding aims to help democratize the energy system, increase the wellbeing and financial independence of local communities and potentially reduce some local energy bills.
“The UK’s push for clean energy is about answering the call for a different kind of economy that will benefit the many, not just the rich and powerful in our society. Local and community energy is at the heart of our government’s vision,” Miliband said.
“With the largest investment in community energy in British history, this government is saying to every local community: We want you to have and control clean energy so that profits flow to your own community, not just to the big energy companies.”
Funding for locally owned solar, wind, hydropower and biomass projects will be overseen by state company GB Energy, which Labor hopes will help deliver much cheaper electricity bills and greater energy security for the UK.
Claiming that up to £1bn could be spent before the next election, the UK government has described the proposal as the largest ever investment in community-owned energy in the UK. The funding will be shared with the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish governments.
GB Energy said it hopes to support 1,000 clean energy projects that will initially receive grants or loans. This could also allow communities and local councils to buy shares in major privately owned schemes.
Ministers expect the money to pay for solar panels on public buildings, churches and schools, potentially producing much cheaper off-grid energy, or finance small new wind farms where all the profits will be spent on building new homes for social rent, subsidized buses or village halls.
Industry officials welcomed the new funding but said it was far less than the £1bn a year they remember being promised in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto. GB Energy said the funding was part of its multibillion-dollar green energy strategy, which will announce new solar and onshore wind projects this week.
Ministers and supporters of the fund hope it will help combat growing criticism of projects to build taller and larger electricity pylons to significantly improve the UK electricity grid, as well as installing large new onshore wind farms, solar panels and battery farms in rural areas.
Critics see them as an industrialization of the landscape, angry that profits from these schemes flow to private investors and multinational corporations. Some local campaigns challenging these projects have been embraced by the Conservatives and Reform UK, and are being weaponized by US president Donald Trump in his fight to challenge Labour’s wider net zero agenda.
Neither the UK government nor GB Energy have yet published any targets for new community-owned energy capacity, but GB Energy has said it plans to publish a much more detailed description of the funding later this year.
The latest data compiled by umbrella groups Community Energy England, Community Energy Wales and Community Energy Scotland shows the sector has grown steadily since 2017. Total installed capacity increased by 81%, with solar and hydropower capacity more than doubling.
The number of people who are members of community energy companies has also increased, from 30,000 in 2017 to approximately 85,000 in 2024.
Meanwhile, local councils have begun investing in public energy schemes. Edinburgh city council has helped set up a solar cooperative that will install crowdfunded solar panels on public buildings. The Orkney Islands council recently received £62 million in UK government funding to install six turbines near Kirkwall.
Zoe Holliday, chief executive of Community Energy Scotland, said the UK government needed to ensure the electricity grid was capable of handling all this new power; The current system was very disorganized, causing some community projects to fail to progress.
However, this funding could be “truly transformative” for local communities. “A lot of people in rural areas look out their windows and look at these huge turbines on the horizon, but they don’t provide any positive financial benefit to society,” he said.
“For groups pushing forward their own community projects, these become community assets that address energy resilience and provide a revenue stream they can use to meet local priorities.”
